I don't know what part-time/gig economy you're referring to. It's not the one I live in. If people can't find a full-time job, and desperately need one, I implore them to come to WV. There are unskilled, full-time jobs literally all over the place. The ONLY reason they're unfilled is because people here would rather sneak around and do meth than apply for jobs.
It's a regional phenomenon that is confined primarily to the low-skilled job economy in parts of the country that are struggling economically. It can only exist in areas with a struggling private sector, where profit margins are extremely thin, there's no strong manufacturing base, and there's a sizable underclass full of marginally employable people. The vast majority of the entry level jobs are in service and retail. Finally-- and this is very important-- the state laws must be slanted very heavily in favor of the employer.
When I say "slanted" I mean that the net result of employment law makes it easy for employers to jerk their employees around. Such laws are put into place by "business friendly" legislators who really, truly, honestly believe that making life easy for business creates more jobs and better quality jobs. Yet the laws
in combination with other existing laws have some unintended consequences. For example, the state may have "at will" employment in which a person can be fired or let go with minimal notice regardless of reason. Or, they may have a law that allows a union to force all employees of a union company to join as a condition of employment. The law may also permit things like non-compete clauses in even the most menial jobs such as juice counter employees: a person working at a Keva juice counter cannot seek or accept employment with a competitor for at least two years after leaving the job, so as to protect the "valuable intellectual property" of the corporation that hires them. This is at the sort of job where training is minimal (a day or two at most) and the "valuable intellectual property" consists of a recipe list showing which ingredients to throw into the blender. The result is an economy where the cost-to-exchange for an employee is extremely high, but the cost-to-exchange for an employer of unskilled people is negligible. When combined with an artificially high minimum wage, there's a perverse incentive for employers to hire only part-time labor that temporarily gets close to full-time hours when the busy season hits.
In a depressed regional economy, only public sector employees, old money, and the most elite or successful private sector employees have a lot of money to spend year-round. There are surges in the retail and service sector around Black Friday, Christmas, tax return season, and tourist season if there is one and if tourism forms a significant part of the local economy. For unskilled workers, employment is highly seasonal, and in the off season people must be either laid off or have their hours cut back. An outdoor amusement park in a temperate climate, for example, cannot operate in six inches of snow. It will have surges of business during the summer but only weekend traffic during spring and autumn school season, and during the winter it will be closed altogether such that the only people needed to run the place will be a couple administrators and a minimalist groundskeeping and repair staff.
The result of a couple generations of this kind of economy is there's not going to be much in the way of a middle class. A lot of work opportunity tends to exist, but there isn't much money to pay for the work to be done. So employers tend to hire
only what they need. During the slack seasons, people simply can't count on much in terms of hours.
Small businesses that exist in an economy like this tend to have a core group of people-- chiefly the owner and his or her family and friends-- who receive most of the available hours during the slow season. Everyone else bickers over the leftover scraps. It's an environment conducive to blatant nepotism.
For many living in such an economy, there are some possible solutions. One might become an entrepreneur who does the dishing-out of hours, instead of an employee who seeks the hours. One might get into a high-pressure retail job where business is booming year-round, or one might seek out higher education and credentials that allow for year-round employment in a field such as medicine. Each of these strategies has some barriers to entry that anyone on this board can easily identify-- barriers that are surmountable to people on the right side of the bell curve with respect to skills, existing resources, connections, opportunities, or learning abilities. For the left side of the bell curve, not only do they lack bootstraps but they just aren't quite tough enough or bright enough to design, build, and use new ones. With a little nudge, however, there are some individuals who can get into a steady employment-based lifestyle and then mostly coast. There are folks who can live happily on the income from delivering mail or giving out allergy injections.
Now, what SwordGuy and his wife are doing, and what I'm doing but in a different way, involves identifying individuals in a rough economic situation due to being from the left side of the bell curve as described in the previous paragraph, and adding some skills, opportunities and connections to allow them to gain year-round economic security for themselves and their families. The left side of the bell curve has a lot of individuals in it, and many of them are connected to other individuals with some habits that preclude wealth accumulation or even healthy living. So we've learned from experience that just throwing resources at them creates some perverse incentives. The hypothesis in this experiment-- please correct me if I'm wrong, any of my fellow experimenters-- is that creating a painter, a phlebotomist, or a bus driver out of someone whose options would otherwise be limited to burger flipping or cleaning hotel rooms will allow that individual to snag a job that provides benefits such as health care and steady full-time employment, and improve his or her immediate family's economic prospects.
Boxing up a truckload of underclass persons and shipping them to WV without this essential preparation wouldn't do WV any favors.